We were scared like schoolkids on the sets: Rituparna Sengupta

Rituparna Sengpt talks about her experience of working in Rajkahini.
Talking about Rajkahini itself is an emotional experience. This movie has made me undergo a journey of great passion, reality and unfathomable emotional turmoil, which I am unable to express in words. Srijit Mukherji said he wanted me to mentally put myself in a do-or-die situation for this film.I was quite taken aback by this notion. 'Do or die Ritu, I don't know anything that is in between. It has to be either the best or it's nothing,' he told me.This is Srijit Mukherji or SM for you -a director with extreme control over his craft and immense confidence. Begum Jaan spoke with utmost ruthlessness. In reality, it was SM making me speak his own language in the film. She is the epitome of sincerity , that master voice, taking charge of everything with command and utmost gravity; her character devoid of any feminism or female connection. Begum Jaan is all about courage and sincerity . She is a difficult woman who only understands reality and the hard truths of life.
I had an amazing experience with the entire team. SM is not a very cool person and his temperament actually scared us at times like schoolchildren. He had certain rules laid down, which were to be followed without any questions asked. This was his way of imposing things upon you about the character, which can actually cut a deep impression in your mind.SM walked me through the hard realities of life, shared the tales unheard of so far and told me about the rules laid down by Begum Jaan.
Rajkahini tackles a very tough subject. The anecdotes actually make you feel you are travelling through those spaces of history you'd never seen before. We read in our history books about the devastating past of our Partition, the killing, the death and our freedom struggle but the bloodshed it had sparked off was by no means easy to accept. Every moment we would feel that momentum and pain in our performance. Starting from our gun-training, laathi-wielding sessions, fights and armwrestling, we actually shed blood and sweat to perform. As a team of actors, we suffered, cried, fainted, screamed but in every bit of it, stuck to the characters etched out for us. Our shooting stint in Suri, in that awfully cold month of January , kept us numb and silent, but we all performed with absolute commitment and adequate energy .
Many pages of history got revealed in the process. During my dubbing, I screamed my lungs out to change the tone of my voice. I cried my eyes out to get under the skin of the character. SM made me go through hell and back to perform Begum Jaan. My legs trembled, my body ached, I became jittery and shattered but kept at it. A performance to remember, a performance I should be proud of and make others feel proud about it too.
SM gave his life to it. I still don't know how we managed to get the whole act together. It's the most difficult film for any director, actor or producer. Rajkahini will make a lot of difference to my life and my film career. Not only Bengali the film industry , but the whole nation would remember a film like Rajkahini, in which history comes alive. It deals with the goriest bit of human history . I salute my team and feel proud to be a part of this historical piece, where I could play around with a gamut of expressions which challenged me at every step. My audience, I have a great film to share with you; it is very close to my heart. A film that made me an actor, all over again, with a lot of grit and confidence.